Richard Dawkins Quotes page 2 322 Quotes on Natural Selection, Faith, Atheism, and the Essence of Life

“In the case of immigrants from Syria and Iraq I would like to see special preference given to apostates, people who have given up Islam, they are in particular danger.”

The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

“This is where they come into their own, for there's money in hope: the more desperate the hope, the richer the pickings.”

In an interview to The Times — Richard Dawkins: Atheist academic calls for religion 'to be offended at every opportunity' http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-atheist-academic-calls-for-religion-to-be-offended-at-every-opportunity-a7043226.html (23 May 2016)

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Snake Oil"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

“There has been progress in design, but not progress in accomplishment.”

“Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly ‘tracks’ the changing environment.”

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 7 “Constructive Evolution” (p. 186)

“Contrary to earlier prejudices, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution.”

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 7 “Constructive Evolution” (p. 179)

“I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (p. 57 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 7 “Constructive Evolution” (p. 178)

“Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.”

The God Delusion (2006)

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

“What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot?”

“I don't believe you until you tell me, do you really believe, for example, if they say they are Catholic, "Do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?" Mock them. Ridicule them. In public. Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.”

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 79

“With so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.”

Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC,

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

“On the properties of God: "Such a bandwidth! God, who may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know."”

“The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as "faith."”

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 184

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

“More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them - given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by - to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades.”

“Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards … in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on … How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.”

Source: The God Delusion (2006), pp. 347-348 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Gaps in the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

“A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.”

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable” (p. 6)

“There is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive – even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits evolutionary stasis (i. e., no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful continuations or reversals in direction – like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather.”

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 178

“Another force driving progressive evolution is the so-called "arms-race." Prey animals evolve faster running speeds because predators do. Consequently predators have to evolve even faster running speeds, and so on, in an escalating spiral. Such arms races probably account for the spectacularly advanced engineering of eyes, ears, brains, bat "radar" and all the other high-tech weaponry that animals display.”

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

“We don’t need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution”

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Richard Dawkins book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009), p. 164

“I'm told theology is outside my field of expertise. But is theology a "field" at all? Is there anything in "theology" to be expert ABOUT?”

“It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain still who you yourself are!”

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/324171554491596803 (16 April 2013) Twitter

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 6. Genesmanship

“You don't have to be a scientist – you don't have to play the Bunsen burner – in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.”

“There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.”

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

“Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.”

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 9 “Puncturing Punctuationism” (p. 250)

“Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true. (p. 135 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”

Steve Paulson, "The flying spaghetti monster" http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/index3.html (), Salon.com

“If you’re seen to criticise Islam you are often accused of racism, which is absurd.”

The God Delusion (2006)

“Some states, e. g. "pregnant", are all-or-none, no intermediates. But sexual abuse has shades of grey, from violent buggery to mild touching.”

“There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways.”

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/282850316377014272 Twitter

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

Compare: "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own." Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

“You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.”

“Of course politics are important — Iraq, Palestine, even social deprivation in Bradford. But as we wake up to this huge challenge to our civilised values, don't let's forget the elephant in the room — an elephant called "religion."”

[1995-04-28, Kam Patel, Going the whole hog, Times Higher Education, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=97718&sectioncode=26]

“There is one particular property of living things, however, that I want to single out as explicable only by Darwinian selection. This property is the one that has been the recurring topic of this book: adaptive complexity.”

Part 1, 00:00:24
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

“It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.”

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 11 “Doomed Rivals” (p. 288)